Authorship Criteria

Authorship confers credit and has important academic, social, and financial implications. Authorship also implies responsibility and accountability for published work. The Pakistan Armed Forces Medical Journal (PAFMJ) adheres to the authorship criteria set forth by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

We accept publications/articles from both national and international Authors.

Authorship bestows academic, moral, and monetary responsibilities on an individual. It imparts liability and accountability for a scholarly publication. Therefore, it is the moral obligation of an editorial board to ensure that individuals making significant contribution to a paper are given credit for it but also to ensure that the authors understand their role in taking responsibility for their publication. Pakistan Armed Forces Medical Journal follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines which recommends that authorship be based on the following four criteria:

  • Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
  • Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
  • Final approval of the version to be published; AND
  • Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Those who do not meet all four criteria but have made substantive contribution in the research should be acknowledged in the acknowledgment section of the article.

It is important to note that:

  • Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not justify authorship.
  • An author should be able to identify other aspects of the work done by their co-authors
  • Once authorship certificate is submitted no further change will be allowed in the sequence and addition of new authors.

Author Contributions

An author contributorship statement that defines exactly how each author has contributed to the article should be provided. This must be done in two forms: one by filling out the authors’ certificate (can be downloaded from the PAFMJ website) and uploading it with the other submission documents; and the other by writing the contributorship statement in the main article text in the form of a short paragraph specifying the individual contributions using only the initials of the authors so as not to expose the identity of the authors.

The following statements should be used: X.X. and Y.Y: Conceptualization. X.X:  Study design. X.X. and Z.Z: Data acquisition. X.X:  Data analysis. Y.Y: data interpretation. Z.Z and Y.Y: drafting. Y.Y and X.X: Critical Review. Authors agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

For review articles, where individual statements are less applicable, a statement should be included that clarifies who was responsible for the ideation, who performed the literature search and/or data analysis, and who drafted and revised the work.

Deceased Authors

Deceased authors would be included with a death dagger (†) next to the author's name and a footnote stating that the author is deceased along with the date of death.